the torture problem

Bouncing off of David Blacker's post again.

"At any rate, the way the problematic was always presented to me was one of
Sartre in the resistance
(he was, as I recall, a minor courier, after imprisonment) wondering why some
people break down
under torture and some don't. Everyone was wondering how THEY would hold up.
For S, the
inauthentic bad faith move is to say "they made me tell" because, it seems,
there was always that
millisecond longer you could have held out, so it was YOU that made the
choice. Very rigid on
responsibility!"

Violence propagates itself through a series of ruptures
to the truth, ontological ruptures, displacements, etc.
The general status quo concerning violence, the
epistemology of violence in praxis, can be read off
according to how the situation of torture of the
individual is read off, understood, thought about.
Breaking under individual torture can be attributed to
many things: the ferocity of the torturer, the moral
goodness of the tortured, the skill of the torturer, the
skill of the tortured, the psychological profile/style of
the tortured, etc. The rupture (but not necessarily
violence) of the revelation of secrets under torture can
be taken as either an effect of the violence of the
torturer or the tortured, or in combination. A "good man"
may have a psychological configuration which breaks
easily under torture. To what extent do people capitalize
on this violently extreme situation and take the breaking
down as a determination in general of the "goodness",
along with other ontological determinations like
"manhood", patriotism, etc., of the tortured? Like
Heidegger's comment about the status of thinking held in
the artificial grips of "logic" in the scholastic sense,
"Such judgment may be compared to the practice of trying
to evaluate the nature and powers of a fish by seeing how
long it can live on dry land." To what extent is the very
breaking down itself simply another violence perpetrated
by the torturer and his or her group? How is this kind of
determination made? How does justice move through these
questions? In my best estimation, fallen moral dasein,
even those on the "right side", would fare very badly
when brought into view within a free and open conception
of *essential* violence as opposed to *physical*
violence.

War, as the paradigm of physical violence, hypostatizes
the division between the "physical" and the "psychical".
Heidegger's thinking makes possible, in conjunction with
the space of thinking he works in interaction with (as
per, for example, David S.'s recent post applauding
Heidegger's method of recognizing the limited truth of
prevailing/everyday undstandings), a freer conception of
*essential* violence. The conception of *essential*
violence does not restrict itself to the limited
paradigm, itself practical to a certain extent, of blood
and ruptured flesh. Answering the question or approaching
the problem of this torture example, Sartre's operational
explanation of "bad faith", the logics and regimes of
choice, will, intention, etc., would involve not simply
deplying a test like Sartre's, but would activate one's
own relation to violence as such and would require an
intependent and substantive thematization of violence.

---
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.

Tom Blancato
tblancato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)




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